Thank You, Macintosh OS, for Changing the World

Was there really a time before Macs? More importantly, was there really a time before the Macintosh Operating System? As I sit here typing on a Macbook Air running Mac OS X Mavericks, the pinnacle of the art form of Mac, with every technical obstacle between me and the interface removed, it's genuinely hard to remember it wasn't always this way.

All computers that weren't the Mac imitated its style. In the modern digital world, we are surrounded by its legacy. It's like a fish trying to remember a time before oceans.

But we shouldn't take the Mac for granted. The world it introduced was not inevitable; far from it. Once upon a time, computers didn't just work like this. User interfaces didn't make any kind of sense to the uninitiated. They weren't visual. You couldn't even use a mouse. Computers were scary monsters, and the only way to feed them instructions was in the punishing form of code. IBM PCs ruled the world with no clear contender.

Then a deodorant-free fruitarian hippy, a college dropout and game-maker who'd dropped acid to understand technology and named his company after a summer spent on a communal orchard, realized something that approached his vision of what computers could be. It was friendly, elegant, visual, intuitive. Inspired by a key visit to the researchers at Xerox PARC, it offered a mouse and a graphical interface. You controlled a cursor! You pointed, you clicked, you caused a revolution.

The fruitarian, who was already on shaky ground with the former Pepsi CEO he'd given his company over to, drove his skunkworks team crazy, nonstop, for years. He yelled at them about minimalism, about the fact that there were no true squares in nature, only rounded edges. He micromanaged the design of fonts based on a college class in typography that he hadn't even signed up for. He made them sign the inside of the case so they would understand this machine was supposed to be beautiful inside and out.

The iconic Super Bowl commercial (above) came first, on Jan. 22, 1984. It didn't even show the machine. It was, in effect, the world's most expensive flier advertising a meeting. Steve Jobs, cleaned up and smiling in a bow tie, introduced the Macintosh on Jan. 24. He pulled it, rather awkwardly, out of a bag. When the words "Macintosh" started rolling across the screen, followed by "insanely great," all to the soundtrack of Chariots of Fire, the audience was on its feet. They barely stopped applauding to let Steve or the computer speak.

I was there for the unveiling of the Macbook, the Powerbook, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. I never saw a full-on standing ovation; I never heard applause sustained for many long minutes as for the Macintosh. It even sounded like a revolution. Check it out:

The revolution didn't proceed as smoothly as we remember. Macintosh looked great, and made a huge media splash — even filtering into the comics page when the residents of Bloom County picked one up. But back in the real world, the $2,000 price tag (that would be about $4,500 today) was too rich for most budgets. The machine didn't come with a hard drive, its 128K of RAM was restrictive, and it was only bundled with two apps, MacWrite and MacPaint. It was not the hit Jobs hoped it would be, and helped precipitate his 13-year exile from the company.

But consider the operating system. Just look at the Mac OS in 1984 next to Mac OS X in 2014. What has changed? The OS is in color, it's gotten speedier, it has a dock full of apps and it's running a different kernel under the hood. Otherwise, the system looks pretty much the same.

You still have a black Apple icon in the top left hand corner, followed by File, Edit and View. You still have a clean desktop with a few folders and files on it. And all windows still have that slight rounded edge to them.

Compare that to how much Microsoft has futzed with the Windows OS over the years. Windows 1.0, launched in 1985, was a bunch of confusing blocky squares filling the screen. Windows 8, launched last year, offers Live Tiles, a bunch of confusing blocky squares filling the screen, but also the Mac-like desktop of Windows 3 through Vista. Microsoft got rid of the iconic Start button, then put it back just as hastily.

With the Mac OS, Apple got it right out of the gate. You might say every upgrade since then has simply used whatever technology had become available to enhance Jobs' original vision. The Macintosh unveiling projected the illusion of a computer you could talk to. Now you actually can. One of the least-known features of Mac OS X Mavericks is enhanced offline dictation, with voice recognition on par with Dragon Naturally Speaking. And that's a feature Apple isn't even advertising.

It's quite possible that, given another 30 years, the Mac OS will change beyond all recognition. Maybe its mobile sibling, iOS, will take over the desktop. But somehow I doubt it. There will still be a need for laptops and desktops. Voice recognition will come along in leaps and bounds, and maybe the future will look a little like Her — but there will always be times when you want to be quiet, to type, to point-and-click.

So thank you, Steve, for sweating the details, for driving the Mac team up the wall, for demanding perfection. Thirty years later, there's no question we're all living your acid-inspired, insanely great dream.

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